Location: Another great post taking place from the best place on earth!

Posts: 973

Yeah, a weekend is not enough time to go sailing! You have some great pictures and great weather so that is a bonus. Did you go through Dodds Narrows? I had a great time when I was younger in my friends fishing boat, it can get pretty fast going through when the timing is right.

Also, Laceoflight great photo collection on the light houses of Quebec! It is a great theme. I love the picture with all the sea gulls.

Speaking of Grasslands National Park in Saskatchewan..
Just this last week The Nature Conservancy of Canada has established the Wideview Complex, a conservation Area in between East & West blocks of the National Park. Grasslands is the most threaten ecosystem in the world, & only 20% of Saskatchewan's prairie remains relatively intact or conservable back to original form.

Interesting fact about this area in SouthWestern Saskatchewan is that it along with extreme SouthEastern Alberta is the only part of Canada that watershed drains into the Mississippi through New Orleans..

Wideview Complex is home to some very unique species of wildlife. Here's a few of the animals you can encounter in the region and no where else in Canada..

Tourisme Québec's new campaign «Chambre avec vues».
Wondering if they really are from Brooklyn, NY ;-)
I got to say I really like Tourisme Québec's campaigns lately. Do the other provinces have them too ? I've seen some from New Brunswick and Nova Scotia... and maybe one from BC... I would be interested !

Land area : ~7900 km2.
20th largest island in Canada. 90th in the world.
Permanent population : 240, mostly in the village of Port-Menier.

Located between Québec's Côte-Nord and Gaspésie, separated from the land by Jacques-Cartier and Hunguedo straits, Anticosti island marks the entrance of the St. Lawrence river into its Gulf. In my opinion, this island probably represents what's the closest to a boreal paradise. Canyons, epic waterfalls, valleys, turquoise waters, dramatic landscapes, legendary shipwrecks, legendary hunts, and the ghosts of sorcerer Olivier Gamache and chocolate-maker Henri Menier... This island is anything but ordinary. A group of scientists and local developers just submitted an application for UNESCO World Heritage. We'll see how it unfolds.

Here's some historical background (mostly from Wiki, but I'll complete).

Anticosti, the name

The French explorer Jacques Cartier sailed along its shore in the summer of 1534. He provided its first written description and named it Isle de l'Assomption. About 1586, the historian André Thevet wrote that "the savages named [it] Naticousti", while Samuel de Champlain spelled it Antiscoti (1612), Antiscoty (1613), Enticosty (1625) and Antycosty (1632).

1680-1763 : Louis Jolliet and his fort

Its first settlers arrived in 1680 when King Louis XIV gave Louis Jolliet the Seigneury of the Mingan Archipelago and Anticosti Island as compensation for exploring the Mississippi and Hudson Bay. Louis Jolliet erected a fort on Anticosti and in the spring of 1681 settled there with his wife, four children and six servants. His fort was captured and occupied during the winter of 1690 by some of the Massachusetts troops of William Phips during their retreat after an unsuccessful attempt to capture Quebec City. After Jolliet's death in 1700, the Jolliet family retained ownership until 1763 when the island became part of British North America.

1763-1890 : exploitation of natural resources

The island was then more seen as a lumber reserve than anything else. In 1874, it was bought by the Anticosti Island Company and they founded the villages at English Bay (today, Baie-Sainte-Claire) and Fox Bay. Most of the inhabitants, however, continued to be the few keepers of the island's many lighthouses. Because of the number of shipwrecks around the island, stores of provisions were also maintained around the island for sailors who might be washed ashore (Galiotte, Chicotte, Heath Point...) In 1882, the Parish of Notre-Dame-de-l'Assomption was founded, a term referring to Cartier's name for the island. By the 1890s, the fish and wildlife of the island had been almost eradicated through the locals' indiscriminate slaughter.

The Legend of Olivier Gamache

Oliver Gamache lived in Port Menier between 1831 and 1857. No one really knew where came from but then no one really cared to find out. Gamache was a strange bird. On a regular basis he would trick a local innkeeper into believing that he was having dinner with the devil so that the innkeeper would give him two helpings of dinner. He would them quickly eat both while paying only for one. Gamache was a primarily a farmer but he also shared duties manning the government emergency supply depot. In this role he saved victims of shipwrecks and salvaged supplies, often for his own use. Although salvage was a common practice on Anticosti, Gamache was often accused of being a “moonraker” as he purposefully mislead ships to hit the island shore. Gamache died in the winter of 1900. He was found in the spring in his cabin sitting comfortably in a chair with his feet resting in a small tub of solid ice.

1895 - 1926 : owned by a French tycoon, Henri MENIER

In 1895, Anticosti was sold for $125,000 to French chocolate maker Henri Menier who also leased the shore fishing rights. Menier named the island's 70 m (230 ft) high Vauréal Falls after the town of Vauréal in France where he owned a home. He constructed the entire village of Port-Menier (at that time, Fox Bay and Baie-Sainte-Claire were abandoned), built a cannery for packing fish and lobsters, and attempted to develop its resources of lumber, peat and minerals. Many of the original houses still stand today. Furthermore, he converted the island into a personal game preserve and introduced nonindigenous animals for this purpose, including a herd of 220 white-tailed deer. The deer thrived and today the population exceeds 160,000.

Henri Menier died in 1913 and his brother Gaston became the owner of Anticosti Island. He used and maintained it for a time but eventually decided it was not an economically viable operation and sold it to a pulp and paper company in 1926 for $6,000,000. For the next five decades, the island was used almost exclusively by logging companies which invested nothing in environmental or heritage protection, while the villages at English Bay and Fox Bay were abandoned.

Recent history

In 1974, the government of Quebec purchased the island from the forestry company. To this day, Anticosti Island is considered the “Graveyard of the St Lawrence”, having claimed in excess of 400 wrecks. As of 2017, about 60% is under management by Sépaq and since April 2001, 572 km2 has been designated as a national conservation park. With its 24 rivers and streams bountiful with salmon and trout, the island is now a tourist destination for anglers and hunters, particularly from the United States and Canada, as well as for paleontologists, bird watchers and hikers.The mouth of the rivers provide a good shelter on Anticosti, because there is freshwater, and hunting for seals and fishing for salmon is excellent.

On the other hand, in June 2011, the Quebec firm Pétrolia claimed to have discovered about 30 billion barrels of oil on the island of Anticosti, which is the first time that significant reserves have been found in the province. Enough with history. Now let's see.

I found a couple of pictures. To help you all locate the different places where the pictures were taken or the history/legends took place, I drew a map of the island. It seems pretty difficult to find anything that resembles a cultural map of Anticosti... So here's something I fixed :

Anticosti is known as the graveyard of the Saint Lawrence, counting more than 400 shipwrecks lying on its shores. It's a real pleasure to explore. Many are the stories. Here's one. In November of 1828, a ship called the Granicus wrecked on the shores of Anticosti Island. The subsequent discovery of the crew and passengers some 6 months later turned into a case of murder and cannibalism.

The Granicus struck a reef on the eastern part of Anticosti island. The crew and passengers, numbering 30 in total, including 3 children and two women, all made it ashore and wintered over near Fox Bay (baie du Renard), living on supplies salvaged from the ship. On May 8th, 1829, a whaling schooner found the camp and were horrified by the sight. The wreck-survivors were all dead but they did not die of exposure, disease or malnutrition – they were murdered, cooked and eaten. The ship’s log was found with entries up to April 28th. Nothing in it gave a clue as to what had happened. Sometime between April 28 and May 6th, a period of only 8 days, someone had killed the survivors, cooked some body parts and left others to hang on a line. In one of the cabins, the horrified whalers found, lying peacefully in a bed, a recently-deceased man, whom they assumed was the murderer.